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The delicate sound of an onstage kiss triggers a cacophony of audience gasps, whoops, and furious whispers in Shifters, an epic romcom that’s transferred to the West End from new writing powerhouse Bush Theatre. The joy of Benedict Lombe’s will-they-won’t-they love story isn’t just the inventive, emotionally astute writing – it’s the fevered reactions it gets from the crowd who hang on tight through every twist and turn.
It centres on a couple who clash from their very first meeting as teenagers in a rural school. Dre (Tosin Cole) wants Des (Heather Agyepong) to join the school debate team, so naturally she responds with a powerhouse display of her argumentative skills. Neatly, she picks apart his nice guy demeanour and works out his true motives – he wants to win a debate competition, to use the prize money to visit his estranged mother in Nigeria.
Over a decade later, they meet again at Dre’s beloved grandmother’s funeral. Surprisingly, this time he’s the cool and composed one, as an emotional Des finds that the buffet table stirs up memories by the plateful: she has a Proustian moment eating beignets that are just like her own grandmother’s, long ago. Now that she’s moved away from home, food is a way for her to unlock parts of her heritage that she’s half-forgotten, their flavours as complex as her lost Mum’s Congolese speciality Ngai Ngai.
Lombe’s play is full of meditations on memory. We’re told that first love makes an especially deep dent in our brains and that events from our past get distorted to fit the narratives we tell ourselves in the present. Those touches of neuroscience are echoed both in Alex Berry’s synapse-like neon-lit set design and in the play’s structure, which skips restlessly between past and present, blurring them together as it builds to an intriguingly ambiguous ending.
Like Nick Payne’s 2012 hit West End two-hander Constellations, Shifters is a love story with big themes woven through it – and sometimes its musings on destiny, memory and trauma risk overwhelming it. But it’s got a real, welcome lightness too. Lombe’s dialogue beautifully captures the way these lovers trip up on their own words. Feeling out his identity as a Black kid in a majority-white school, Dre punctuates an eloquent speech with a blunt “ya get me”, then cringes at his own awkwardness. In the present, Des swoons over a revamped bus stop’s curves of glass and steel – “it’s giving sexy” – then submerges her embarrassment in a dance that’s goofy and flirty all at once.
Cole and Agyepong have an undeniable chemistry in these central roles, but there’s always something deeper simmering away underneath, too – Cole exposes layer after layer of pain underneath his perma-smile, while Agyepong gives glimpses of vulnerability before building her walls up again, higher than before. And the push-pull of their relationship is given space to breathe by Lynette Linton’s skilful direction, which encourages them to pause and feel the audience gasp and whoop.
Linton is artistic director of west London’s Bush Theatre, which also transferred Tyrell Williams’ debut play Red Pitch this year – adding to a growing body of hit West End plays by Black writers. Shifters is a brilliant addition to this canon, and to a theatreland that’s finding new audiences to love it, argue with it, and bring it to life.
‘Shifters’ is at Duke of York’s Theatre until 12 October; shifterstheplay.co.uk
